Hi, I need help please, i am trying to install Windows 95 on a toughbook which does not have a CD rom drive. so i am using an external cd rom drive to install it. however i get an error once it boots that no cdrom device was found. any ideas what i can do to make it detect my usb cdrom during boot please? can i use Windows 98se boot disk? Thanks,

What are the specs of the ToughBook? And why would you want Win95 on it? Depending on how much RAM you have, you'll probably have to reduce the amount to less than 512MB. And depending on the processor used, you *may* run into some major problems, not to mention driver support for a 15 yr old OS on what I assume is a realtively modern machine? USB support (or lack of) is another problem you're going to encounter. From what I remember, Win95 CD's were not bootable so you would have to preload the drivers from a boot floppy. I don't know how that would work with a USB drive though. You may be better off creating a bootable Win95 disc. That *may* be a problem though because Win95 didn't support USB until OSR 2.1 / OSR 2.5 & even then the support was minimal. Do you know which version of 95 you have? Availability of Universal Serial Bus Support in Windows 95 "Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and OSR 2.5 provides basic USB support that was developed as the technology was first emerging. Based on today's more mature USB technology, there are a number of limitations with USB support in Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and Windows 95 OSR 2.5. These limitations were addressed in Microsoft Windows 98 and carried forward to Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Addressing these limitations required several architectural changes that are not portable back to Windows 95 OSR 2.1 or Windows 95 OSR 2.5. Microsoft recommends that customers who require a more robust USB environment upgrade to Windows 98 or Windows 98 Second Edition." Windows 95 OSR2.x Support for External USB Hubs If for some reason you feel you need Win95, you'd probably be better off installing a more modern OS, then setting up Win95 as a VM.

Hi Jam, Thanks for the information, well i need win 95 because we have some old fire panel which we need to re-program. The panel uses what i think is known as 'True Dos' applications to communicate through the serial port com1. i have already tried to do this using windows xp but failed, from doing some reading i think this was because XP does not have true dos mode. When the panels were first setup they were setup with windows95 on some older toughbooks and we still have some of them, but they are 12 years old and on their last legs, so i wanted to basically give them fresh toughbooks with windows 95. So i actually did create a bootable windows 95 disk and it work on a laptop which had a built in CDrom drive. however i am using a usb CDrom drive on the toughbook as it dos not have an internal but when it boots it says "No supported device found" which leeds me to believe that it ONLY looks for IDE devices. I downloaded the boot disk from bootdisk.com and these were for win95, im wondering will win98 ones work? Also another question, if i have a bootable iso can i replace the boot part of it with another? basically i want to replace the win95 boot disk with the win 98 can i just overwrite using magic iso? I will look into the virtual machine as well, i know i tried this before as you suggested and when we tried it out on the panels it blue screen out. So we didnt try again. The tough book is a Panasonic CF-18 one of them Mark2 and the other mark 3. it does not have any aditional memory or any upgrades its the most basic version. processor: Intel Pentium M 1100MHz 592 MHz, 248 RAM not looking good is it? Thanks, I have windows 95 4.00 B

Yeah, the bootdisks at bootdisk.com are going to have IDE/Atapi drivers unless otherwise indicated. The cdrom drivers on a 9X bootdisk are dos drivers as would drivers needed to set up the USB port. You may be able to install 95 by using a 98 bootdisk with the necessary drivers. But as Jam mentions, if you're looking for continued USB support you'll probably be out of luck. There's also the potential problem of finding 95 drivers for the toughbook. Anything you can do in 95 you can probably do with 98 so you might consider installing 98 SE. Bootdisk.com has some dos USB suggestions that will work on a bootdisk.

Hello, Thank you everyone for your assistance, i have opted for installing windows xp tablet (which came with the toughbook) and then installed Win95 vitual machine and Win98 virtual machine. i will test both and if 98 works then i will install that on the machine, as suggested i can do everything 95 does in 98 and more. Will post back if anything goes wrong during the test. Thanks again. Bunty